Samuel Huntington, political scientist, dies at 81

BOSTON (AP) -- Samuel Huntington, a political scientist best
known for his views on the clash of civilizations, died Wednesday
on Martha's Vineyard, Harvard University announced Saturday. He was
81.

Huntington had retired from active teaching in 2007 after 58
years at Harvard. His research and teaching focused on American
government, democratization, military politics, strategy, and
civil-military relations.

He argued that in a post-Cold War world, violent conflict would
come not from ideological friction between nations, but from
cultural and religious differences among the world's major
civilizations.

He identified those civilizations as Western (including the
United States and Europe), Latin American, Islamic, African,
Orthodox (with Russia as a core state), and Hindu, Japanese, and
"Sinic" (including China, Korea, and Vietnam).

He made the argument in a 1993 article in the journal Foreign
Affairs, and then expanded the thesis into a book, "The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," which was published
in 1996. The book has been translated into 39 languages.

In all, Huntington wrote 17 books including "The Soldier and the
State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations,"
published in 1957 and inspired by President Harry Truman's firing
of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and "Political Power: USA-USSR," a study
of Cold War dynamics, which he co-authored in 1964 with Zbigniew
Brzezinski.

His 1969 book, "Political Order in Changing Societies," analyzed
political and economic development in the Third World.

"Sam was the kind of scholar that made Harvard a great
university," Huntington's friend of nearly six decades, economist
Henry Rosovsky said in a statement released by the university.

Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City. He
received his B.A. from Yale in 1946, served in the U.S. Army,
earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1948, and a Ph.D.
from Harvard in 1951.